Today marks the International Day of the Endangered Lawyer. Organized by a network of national and international legal organizations and bar associations and already in its 14th year, the day’s focus this year is on lawyers in Iran, where such human rights defenders clearly are under enormous pressure. All lawyers need to be protected so they can work in an environment free from pressure and intimidation from autocratic governments. If lawyers are not protected, their clients inadvertently suffer too. The lawyers working on cases of political prisoners tend to become an obvious and immediate target for repressive governments, in order to pressure and isolate the defendants even more.
Russian lawyer Vadim Prokhorov has defended many #PoliticalPrisoners. Threats over @vkaramurza’s case finally forced him to flee #Russia.
On International Day of the Endangered Lawyer, he explains why others like him need support:#EndangeredLawyershttps://t.co/0dyKKqj78j
— Just Security (@just_security) January 24, 2024
On this day, though, I also want to draw attention to the lawyers working on the cases of political prisoners in Russia and Belarus. I am one of them. I know from first-hand experience that, in addition to legal assistance, lawyers of political prisoners help them maintain connections with the outside world, even from the middle of Siberia or above the Arctic Circle. It gives those defendants a chance to have their cases heard in court and brought to public attention, even in autocracies like Russia and Belarus.
Since 1999, I have worked on many sensitive cases of well-known opposition figures, human rights defenders, and political prisoners. My clients in Russia have included famed opposition leader Boris Nemtsov before he was assassinated near the Kremlin in 2015, jailed activist Ilya Yashin, the late dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, and Washington Post columnist and Kremlin critic Vladimir Kara-Murza.
The case of Vladimir Kara-Murza is the most recent case I worked on and the reason why I was forced to flee my country. Vladimir is a Russian political prisoner, a prominent opposition figure, a human rights defender, and a loving father of three. He had been poisoned twice and continuously harassed by the Russian state because of his human rights work and political activities. On April 11, 2022, after he again insisted on returning to his homeland after treatment abroad because he felt that was the most genuine way for him to have an impact, the Russian authorities arrested and charged him with “high treason,” eventually sentencing him to prison for 25 years. I started to represent him immediately after his detention.
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